Life by You has officially been cancelled!

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Unfortunately for life sim fans, Paradox Interactive has confirmed that Life by You has been officially cancelled. A month ago, the developer had indefinitely postponed the game, which until then was planned to be released in September.

According to the note issued by the company:

Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel the release of our highly anticipated life simulator, Life by You. This was an incredibly difficult decision to make and is a clear failure on Paradox's part to meet our expectations and those of the community. We realize this raises some important questions; Here we hope to shed at least some light on why we chose to cancel rather than postpone as we previously communicated.

According to Mattias Lilja, Deputy CEO of Paradox, when analyzing the state of the game, they came to the conclusion that many areas were below the desired quality, and to reach the level desired would take a lot of time and effort.

Life by You has been in development for a long time and we were very excited about the promise and potential of this game. Our hope has always been that he would be able to make a mark in this new and exciting genre for us. That's why we chose to delay it twice, to give the studio and the game a fair chance to realize the potential we saw. For every delay we made, we saw incremental improvements, which in hindsight may well have led us to focus on the details rather than the big picture.

A few weeks ago, we decided to delay the Early Access launch to re-evaluate Life by You, as we still felt the game was lacking in some key areas. While a delay was an option, after we took that break to get a broader look at the game, it became clear to us that the road to a release we felt confident in was very long and uncertain.

When we reach a point where we believe that more time will not get us close enough to a version we would be satisfied with, then we believe it is best to stop. This is obviously difficult and disappointing for everyone who has invested their time and enthusiasm into this project, especially when our decision comes so late in the process.

For the CEO, Paradox needs to reevaluate the process that led Life by You to reach this stage and ensure that this no longer happens in future projects.

Ultimately, our job is to release games that are fun, interesting, and challenging for our players, and all of our decisions must be made with that purpose in mind. When we get it right, we earn our paycheck. So how can we ensure we don't find ourselves here again? Honestly, there are no real guarantees. Games are hard to get right and we're bound to make mistakes, which as these things happen always become painfully apparent in hindsight, but still shouldn't reach this kind of magnitude anyway. We have to take a good look at what got us here and see what changes we need to make to become better.

This is bad news, as gamers who are fans of the genre have been waiting for years at least for a competitor as an alternative to the The Sims franchise, as EA has dominated the game style for decades and is becoming increasingly displeased. The fans. All we can do is wait for the release of The Sims 5 and see what awaits us.